Company aims to bring dead people back to life
Scottsdale facility freezes bodies in hopes of reviving them
Inside a Scottsdale office building are the heads and bodies of 168 people who have been “cryonically preserved” with the hope that death will not be permanent.
One of the most famous occupants at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is baseball legend Ted Williams, whose head and body are stored separately inside large cylindrical stainless-steel tanks at the foundation’s offices.
Alcor, which began in California in 1972, has operated in Arizona since 1994. The nonprofit company’s office houses 168 “patients” and 90 pets (cats, dogs, one turtle and one chinchilla), who have died but are being preserved at subzero temperatures in a way that
may allow them to be revived and one day live again, Alcor officials say.
Alcor considers its patients as not dead, but rather in a suspended, in-between state.
The company has 1,250 still-living “members” who have made the legal arrangements and paid up to $200,000 apiece to reserve a spot in one of Alcor’s thermos-like tanks when they die. Each tank is stocked with liquid nitrogen to keep bodies at a temperature of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit and can hold five heads and four whole bodies.
So far, cryonics has proven far more popular with men than women. About 75 percent of Alcor members and patients are male.
Alcor is not a big organization. About eight members die per year, but there have been years when none has died. One of the reasons for its low membership is that Alcor does virtually no marketing. They don’t want to mislead the public into thinking that they have a guaranteed ticket to the future after they die, officials said.
“It’s an engineering problem, how to make it happen,” Alcor co-founder Linda Chamberlain said. “We want people to understand that this is still an experimental process. We don’t want anyone to come into this, make arrangements and think this is like going to the hospital and having open-heart surgery, that their chances are just as good. It’s not there yet.”
When “members” die, they become patients who may choose to remain anonymous. Those non-confidential patients who have waived anonymity may have their photo and name up on the wall inside Alcor’s offices, where patients are regarded as people company officials will eventually encounter again.
The photos are a daily reminder to Alcor employees of “why we’re here” and “who we’re working for,” Chamberlain said.
Besides Ted Williams, patients include Dick Clair Jones, who was a writer for CBS-TV’s “The Carol Burnett Show” and a co-creator of the NBC-TV situation comedy “The Facts of Life”; American scientist Marvin Minsky, who cofounded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s artificial intelligence laboratory; and Chinese science fiction writer Du Hong.
Though Alcor prefers that patients die in Scottsdale, they deploy a team anywhere in the world when one of their members dies. The team includes two physicians, a medical response director and Alcor CEO Max More.
They bring with them a folding ice bath and other equipment to the places where members die, and will contract to use an operating room if needed to infuse patients with a chilled organ transplant solution and cryoprotective chemicals.
Bioethics expert: ‘It is just not doable’
Not surprisingly, many are skeptical of Alcor’s mission. While human embryos can be successfully frozen for in vitro fertilization, there’s a big difference between freezing a cluster of cells and a human being, critics say.
“The whole thing is too science fiction-y. I still believe no one will be able to do what they wish, which is to bring back the dead,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University. “It is just not doable.”
In the event cryonics does work, Caplan questions whether anyone would really want to come back to life 400 or 500 years from now. He compared it to having a person from the 16th century suddenly dropping into 2019.
“I fear you would become mentally deranged by it all,” he said.
The Maryland-based Society for Cryobiology says storing a preserved body, head or brain on the chance that a future generation may restore it to life “is an act of speculation or hope, not science.”
Uproar over Ted Williams’ frozen head
Some Alcor patients are classified as “neuro,” which means they’ve donated their heads only, and that comes at a cost of $80,000. Others choose the whole body, at the more expensive price of $200,000. Many members pay by taking out a life insurance policy in the amount of the Alcor fee.
Half of the money paid goes into the preservation process and half into a patient trust to cover the costs of longterm storage and revival.
Prices for cryopreserving a pet can vary by size, and how much of the pet is frozen. The pet option is available only to Alcor members. A price list for pets ranges from $2,500 to $30,000.
Williams, the longtime Boston Red Sox superstar who died in 2002, is what’s known as a “neuro with whole body,” so his head was removed from his body and cryopreserved, but both parts are at Alcor.
“He was a confidential member,” Chamberlain said of Williams. “But there was so much newspaper coverage that it doesn’t do us any good to deny it.”
Williams’ cryopreservation attracted extensive media attention after a former Alcor employee wrote a tell-all book, saying Williams’ head had been mistreated in the Alcor lab. Alcor has consistently denied the allegations.
The Ted Williams story also included a well-publicized family fight, with one of Williams’ daughters opposed to the idea of her father’s cryopreservation.
Chamberlain says Alcor strongly prefers that members sign up when they are still alive and not leave it up to their next-of-kin because those are the situations that can and do put Alcor in legal fights. Alcor has been sued by relatives of its members before.
“We usually say no to last-minute cases,” Chamberlain said. “Right or wrong, you end up spending money in court. We try to avoid that.”
The reason so many patients preserve only their head is because in the future, scientific advances may allow for a new body to be generated using a person’s DNA, said Chamberlain, a cheerful woman whose email sign-off reads, “Boundless Life.”
Since most patients died with old, sick bodies, the idea of getting a new one is popular — 110 of the patients are “neuro” only and have just their heads preserved; the rest chose to have their whole body preserved.
Technologically, “neuro” is the superior option, Chamberlain said, and it’s also cheaper, but some people have emotional issues about separating their heads from their bodies.
“Anybody who is over the age of 40 has a certain amount of blockages in their arteries and vessels, and those blockages will prevent us from introducing our cryoprotective chemicals,” she explained. “Their cryoprotection will be minimized because of that.”
Alcor has no outside regulation
Alcor is exempt from a 2017 Arizona law that regulates the body-donation industry but has yet to be enforced.
Judith Stapley, executive director of the Arizona State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, said that since Alcor is handling dead people, “there should be some outside entity regulating it and making sure all protocols are in place to protect the public.”
Alcor’s regulation is “all internal,” Chamberlain said.
While Alcor is concerned that “fly by night” organizations could be attracted to opening their own cryonics facilities, Chamberlain said it’s important that any regulation is done by the correct authority. Oversight by the state’s funeral board would not be appropriate, she said.
“We don’t necessarily want to be controlled by some organization that doesn’t know what we’re doing and would be inappropriately managing us,” she said.
The nonprofit does not turn away bodies if they have infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C.
“We suit up in (protective) bunny suits,” Chamberlain said. “In the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis was at its peak, we had many AIDS patients. We just used the very best protection that we could to protect ourselves from being infected.”
Cryonics plan: Freeze, wait, reanimate
Many Alcor members specify the age they’d like to be when they come back to life, and 25 is probably the most popular, said Chamberlain, whose husband, mother and father-in-law are all cryopreserved at Alcor.
“It’s all about these guys, the patients,” Chamberlain said, looking at photos of her family members on the office walls. “This is who we are working for. We’re not just selling Frisbees or something . ... We have family members and friends who are in our patient care bay. So it is not just a business.”
Chamberlain founded the company with her NASA engineer husband, Fred Chamberlain. The company always has been nonprofit so that their mission and procedures would not be dictated by shareholders, she said.
The Chamberlains first bonded over cryonics after reading a 1964 book by American academic Robert Ettinger titled “The Prospect of Immortality.”
Ettinger is considered the “father of cryonics,” Chamberlain said. He laid out the basic idea of cryonics — freeze, wait and reanimate. Ettinger’s idea was if a body could be cooled to a low enough temperature to stop the dying process, the body could be held there until the technology is developed to bring that person back to life.
“Looking at the progress of medical technology just over the last 50 years it’s more of a question of when than if,” Chamberlain said. “It’s been a part of my life for the past 47 years. I can’t really imagine not doing this for myself and my family . ... I enjoy life and I don’t want it to end.”